Jane Austen (2 page)

Cassandra to have a sister to look after and to play with, and with a good share of her father's affectionate nature and her mother's practical good sense, she soon became, young as she was, the most important figure in her little sister's world. Mrs. Austen had her last child soon after, a sixth son, christened Charles, and with a new baby and a large young

- 9 -

family, she was only too glad that Cassandra took upon herself so much of the care of Jane. The younger child repaid her sister's affection a hundred-fold, and Mrs. Austen said that if Cassandra were to have her head cut off, she believed Jane would insist on having hers cut off too.

Life in the Rectory was pleasant for a large party of children; for one thing, the Austens, though very lively, were unusually good

tempered. Family disagreements, to say nothing of family quarrels, were unknown to them, and besides being fond of each other, they were very friendly with the pupils their father took into the house.

Mr. Austen was careful as to whom he accepted, taking only "a few youths of chosen friends and acquaintances," and there are several references to the comfortable way the boys settled in with the family.

"Jemmy and Neddy" were "very happy in a new playfellow, Lord Lymington." He was between five and six years old; then there was Master Vanderstegen; he was nearly fourteen, and backward, but

"very good tempered and well disposed." Another reason for the general pleasantness of a family which, living in somewhat close quarters, might have been expected to get in each other's way, was that the boys had vigorous interests of their own. Intelligent as they all were, their father's teaching was at least not irksome to them, and James and Henry had a strong academic bent; but all of them were wildly eager sportsmen. From their earliest years they hunted and shot, and Francis displayed not only the sporting enthusiasm of the family, but a keen business capacity into the bargain. At the age of seven he bought a pony for one pound, eleven shillings and

sixpence. It was a bright chestnut and he called it Squirrel. He rode to hounds on it for two years, jumping "everything that the pony could get his nose over," and then sold it for two pounds, twelve and six.

- 10 -

For the little girls who could not hunt and shoot, the range of interests was smaller. They did not ride as they might have done.

Mrs. Austen had been a horsewoman, and in her trousseau there had been a scarlet riding habit, but this had long been cut up into coats and trousers for the boys when very little; but there were

amusements to get the girls out of doors. When the weather was good, the walks about Steventon were very beautiful; the lanes were full of primroses and violets in the spring, and the neighborhood had the beauty of Hampshire woodland. Jane said many years afterwards that she thought beauty of landscape must be one of the joys of heaven. There was a home farm also, where Mrs. Austen's dairy was supplied by five Alderney cows; and though Mr. Edward Austen

Leigh says that his aunts would never have taken a hand in the actual brewing and baking of the Rectory, yet a household which has its own dairy, bakes its own bread, brews its own ale and does its own laundering on the premises, has always something going on of

interest to two eager little girls.

When Cassandra was about ten and Jane seven years old, the Rev.

George Austen seems to have felt that for his daughters, at least, his own teaching was not sufficient. Mrs. Austen's sister, the beautiful Jane, had married Dr. Cooper, a clergyman living near Bath, and Dr.

Cooper had a sister, Mrs. Cawley, who, the widow of a master of Brasenose, undertook the care of a few children at her house in Oxford. Jane was thought to be too young to benefit very much from any educational advantages Mrs. Cawley might bestow, but it was already taken for granted by the family that where Cassandra went, there, if humanly possible, she must go also. With them went their cousin Jane Cooper. Perhaps the three of them together were happy enough, but Mrs. Cawley was somewhat unsympathetic and very

formal in her manners,

- 11 -

and coming from such a home as Steventon, Cassandra and Jane felt the change very much. One may imagine Jane, a small, slender child with a round face and big black eyes, following Cassandra like a shadow, shy, but ready at once to be friendly and merry with anyone who was kind. After a while Mrs. Cawley moved to Southampton,

and was allowed to take the children with her. Here, however,

Cassandra and Jane fell ill of what was called at the time a putrid fever, which was perhaps diphtheria. Jane Cooper longed for her mother and aunt, but Mrs. Cawley would not allow her to write to them; at last, however, her cousin Jane became so very ill that the homesick, frightened child could bear it no longer and wrote to her mother, who, with Mrs. Austen, came down to Southampton

immediately. Jane nearly died. She recovered with her mother's nursing, but Mrs. Cooper, who took her daughter away, and went back to Bath with her, had caught the infection, and shortly after died herself.

This severe early illness does not seem to have made the Austens unduly anxious about their younger daughter, and quite soon another boarding school experiment was tried, this time with much more success. The Abbey School at Reading where Jane and Cassandra

were sent was kept by an elderly lady called Mrs. Latournelle. It was a simple sort of place, and Mrs. Sherwood, who went to the Abbey School about five years later than the Austens, has left a vivid account of it in her autobiography.

Mrs. Latournelle was far removed from the severity of Mrs. Cawley.

It was true that her cap and neckerchief were always starched and spotless, that her parlor was hung round with pictures of urns and weeping willows embroidered in chenille; but she was at the same time stout and very active, although she had a cork leg, and Mrs.

Sherwood

- 12 -

estimated her capacity as fit for nothing but giving out clothes for the wash, ordering dinner and making tea. She added that so far as she could remember, Mrs. Latournelle's conversation was never so fluent as upon the topic of plays and play-acting, green-room anecdotes and the private lives of actors.

The school buildings were romantic, formed in part as they were of the old gatehouse of the Abbey, and surrounded by a spacious, shady garden, very delightful to the girls on hot summer evenings. The régime was easy-going in the extreme. Provided the girls appeared in the tutor's study for a few hours each morning, they could spend the rest of the day gossiping in the turrets, lounging in the garden or out of the window above the gateway, quite undeterred by the jovial old lady of the cork leg. At the same time the domestic arrangements were admirably clean and comfortable. Altogether it seems to have been a school in a thousand.

The Austens' stay, however, was not a lengthy one. When Jane was nine they returned home, and from that time they never left it. Mr.

Austen had sent his daughters away for the benefit of a young lady's education, and they may indeed have "scrambled themselves" into the rudiments of one, for if Mrs. Latournelle did not arduously promote a girl's education, at least she did not, like some

schoolmistresses, go out of her way to obstruct it; but there can be no doubt that Jane Austen's real education was pined in the years between nine and sixteen which she spent under her father's care.

When Henry Austen prefixed a short biographical notice of his sister to the posthumous edition of
Northanger Abbey
and
Persuasion
, he dwelt on what the Rector had done for his brilliant child. "Being not only a profound scholar, but possesssing a most exquisite taste in every species of literature, it is not wonderful that his daughter

- 13 -

Jane should at a very early age have become sensible to the charms of style and enthusiastic in the cultivation of her own language."

Whether she joined her brothers' lessons in the Rector's study, or whether Mr. Austen gave her what time he could spare apart from them, we do not know. His attention was not now so fully occupied by his sons. James, who was twelve years older than Jane, had

already obtained an Oxford degree and was a Fellow of St. John's.

He was the most scholarly of all the brothers, and Jane very much admired his gifts; he was the least lively of the family, with a thin face and dark melancholy eyes; very much in sympathy with the

dawning Romantic Revival, and fond of Cowper's poetry. The

second brother, Edward, had been removed from the family circle by what was, from a worldly point of view, a stroke of fantastical good fortune. A distant connection of Mr. Austen's, Mr. Thomas Knight of Chawton House in Hampshire and Godmersham Park in Kent, had

no children of his own. His family had always been kindly disposed to the Austens and he and his wife had taken a great fancy to Edward and often had him for visits at Chawton or Godmersham, so much so that Mr. Austen began at last to protest and say Edward was getting too far behind with his Latin grammar; but Mrs. Austen said: "I think, my dear, you had better oblige your cousins and let the child go"; and in due course Mr. Knight adopted Edward and made him the heir to his property. The impression given by Edward's portrait is not that of a clever man, but of an eminently sound and capable one.

Mr. and Mrs. Knight chose the one among the Austen boys most

suited to the career of a country gentleman; they brought him up with that end perpetually in view, and instead of putting him to the University, as his father would probably have

- 14 -

done, they sent him to make the Grand Tour; thus he was abroad when his sisters came home from Reading.

Widely different from James or Edward, was the eldest brother now living at home, Henry, the handsomest, most fascinating, least stable of all the family. Henry inherited his father's bright hazel eyes, and the gaiety and good humor which were family characteristics were concentrated in him with an effect of positive brilliance. He was not profound, but he learned so readily, and executed everything he did with such elegance and dash, that his father's affection for him somewhat overpowered his judgment, and he thought Henry the

cleverest of all his children. High spirits and a flow of stimulating conversation made him a delight in a household where the inmates were all prepared to enjoy each other's company, and though people not under the spell of his immediate presence, and writing of him a generation or so later, could point out his weaknesses--how, unlike his brothers, he could not decide on a career and pursue it without looking back, but was first a soldier, then a banker and last a clergyman; how he made a marriage that was not to the family's taste; and that when he wrote on a serious subject his sense of humor could not save him from being pompous and jejune--nonetheless, he has an infinite claim on our attention and gratitude; he was Jane Austen's favorite brother, and it was he who left the short but invaluable account of her.

The two youngest brothers were also at home, though Francis, a year older than Jane, was soon, at the age of twelve, to enter the Naval Academy at Portsmouth. Francis, as might be expected of the infant horse-dealer, was a "selfcontained" child, and remarkably clever with his hands. When he grew up he made toys for his children

which were

- 15 -

carefully handed down to generations of descendants. He had a mop of curly hair, and when he had been told to keep out of a room which he wanted to enter, the door would gradually open and the curls would make their appearance. He was resolute and dauntless in the pursuit of his own way, and never frightened of anything, except the sudden braying of a donkey.

The baby, Charles, was very much the property and plaything of his little sisters; when he was a man he was still to Cassandra and Jane

"our own little brother." It was a very full and well-balanced family life for Jane; parents differing widely but perfectly in sympathy, older brothers to amuse and interest her, a younger brother to take care of, and, more important than all the rest, a sister.

- 16 -

BESIDES THE immediate family, there was a relation who, from

Jane's seventh year or so onward, occupied a most important place in the Austens' attention; whose cleverness, elegance and fashion made her fascinating to Jane as the latter grew up. Jane was very early able to be amused by people's unconscious humor, but she also delighted in positive wit and sparkle, and her father's niece, Eliza Hancock, besides commanding her admiration and affection, is one of the very few people who are pointed out as having inspired a character in one of Jane Austen's novels.

Eliza, or Betsy as she was called at first, was the child of Mr.

Austen's sister Philadelphia and a Dr. Hancock who was known to the great Warren Hastings. Betsy was born in India; she was small, very pretty, with a brown complexion and large black eyes, and like many Anglo-Indian children she grew up imperious and spoiled,

with a conviction of her own importance that even the Austen good sense could never entirely subdue. Her mother doted on her; and it was to her mother's friendship with a Mrs. Buchanan that Betsy owed a piece of remarkable good fortune. Mrs. Buchanan, the

widow of an officer who had perished in the Black Hole, became Warren Hastings' first wife, and when,

- 17 -

a few years later, she died at the birth of a daughter, leaving a boy of three years old, Hastings, anxious to send his son away from the baneful effects of the Indian climate, was only too thankful to hear of Mrs. Hancock's brother, the Rev. George Austen, as a guardian for little George. The latter thus became one of Mr. Austen's earliest pupils, though, as he was little more than a baby, he was more in Mrs. Austen's care than the Rector's; and when he died at the age of six of "a putrid sore throat," Mrs. Austen was almost as much in grief as if he had been a child of her own. In the meantime, the Governor-General, a domestic man and very fond of children, was grateful for the kindness which Mrs. Hancock showed him in his misery, and when her own daughter was born he stood godfather to the baby and gave her the name he had meant to give his own.